Sitting next to a senior leader of a European library at a IIIF event, he expressed concern that asking volunteers to work on transcribing was taking unfair advantage of free labor. My internal reaction was, “you just want to keep all the good stuff for yourself!” -- but of course I didn’t say that. I talked about meaningful volunteer work and how -- since our very first … [Read more...] about Crowdsourcing: Free Labor or Free Puppy?
inspirations
An Archivist's Tale Podcast - The Power of These Primary Sources to Bring Meaning
Back in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, Ben and Sara Brumfield sat with Karen Trivette and Geof Huth, husband and wife, and partners who run the podcast An Archivist's Tale. In this podcast, Ben and Sara discuss the origin story of FromThePage, their own backgrounds leading up to working in transcription software, motivations for the work they do, notable FromThePage … [Read more...] about An Archivist's Tale Podcast - The Power of These Primary Sources to Bring Meaning
Inspiration from PepysDiary.com
The blog version of Pepys Diary shows the shows the power of an online community to provide context for a historical document. To take a page at random, Saturday, 26 March 1664 has explanations for legislative references and 17th century English usage provided by end-users through unstructured annotations.. … [Read more...] about Inspiration from PepysDiary.com
Inspiration from Wikipedia
Wikipedia has been my inspiration for simplifying the problem of indexing and annotation through wiki-style markup. The double-brace syntax for creating hyperlinks is incredibly easy to use — put braces around a phrase and it becomes a hyperlink. Add a pipe in the middle and you can differentiate the link target from the hyperlinked text. The "what links here" feature is an … [Read more...] about Inspiration from Wikipedia